Tag: M&A

Time Warner chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes and AT&T chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson on Monday touted their $85.4 billion cash-and-stock mega-deal on a conference call with Wall Street analysts, repeatedly suggesting it will bring benefits for content creators, among others.

“There is the huge opportunity … to utilize consumer insights to inform content creation, and that allows us to continue to create not just the biggest hits, but also content and programming that really engages with targeted” niche audiences, Bewkes said. “We will develop new innovative business models and forms of content that consumers will be demanding tomorrow in this ubiquitous, multi-platform, on-demand and increasingly mobile environment.”

TuneCore has acquired social media management and analytics tool JustGo. The d.i.y. digital music distributor has already shut down JustGo and relaunched it as Tunecore Social, a free add-on for distribution clients in the U.S., Canada, UK and Australia.

As with JustGo, TuneCore Social offers streamlined posts to Facebook, Twitter, Mixcloud, Soundcloud,YouTube and Instagram plus scheduled posts and analytics.

For years, there was bound to be a moment of large scale consolidation in the music streaming space. This has a lot to do with the way streaming is licensed, resulting in services with very similar product offerings and price points.

This year we’ve seen intensified competition between streaming services through music exclusives and discounting, resulting in Universal Music Group’s CEO reportedly restricting the practice. 2016 may go down as the year that will be known as the end of the beginning for music streaming.

Ole has acquired London-based rights management company Compact Media, who manage Audio-Visual Secondary Rights for more than 700 clients around the world. Compact will remain under its own brand and direction of David Johnson

The news comes just two weeks after Ole raised $500m via a credit facility, having spent $520m on acquisitions since being founded in 2004.

Kobalt Music Group has fully acquired the music publishing and Neighbouring Rights businesses of Fintage House – one of the biggest players, and Kobalt’s toughest rivals, in the multi-billion dollar NR space.

The deal brings Fintage’s NR roster of artists – including Katy Perry (pictured), Bruce Springsteen and Britney Spears – into Kobalt, which already looks after Neighbouring Rights for acts such as Paul McCartney, Sam Smith, Ariana Grande and many more.

All together, our generous valuations of the entire major music rights industry – including both recorded and publishing catalogues – comes to $27bn.

If you had ownership of the kitty Softbank used to buy ARM, that would leave you a measly $5bn in change to pick up as much of the independent sector as you could muster. Which would be nigh on all of it. In other words, the amount Softbank just paid for ARM would, by and large, buy you the entire history of music rights. Just like that.

More than 18,000 songs developed and acquired by Nettwerk’s publishing division over the past 30 years have been bought by Kobalt Music Copyrights (KMC), MBW can reveal.

KMC is an independent investment fund established in 2011. It is advised and managed by Kobalt Capital Ltd – but operates as a separate entity to Kobalt Music Group. The vast majority of copyrights owned by Nettwerk’s publishing company will now switch to KMC, and be administered by Kobalt.